1. Technical Field
The disclosed embodiments relate to online advertiser acquisition and valuation, and more particularly, to a system and methods for determining whether to pursue an advertiser together with keywords related to the advertiser.
2. Related Art
Online service providers (OSP) are oftentimes also advertisement brokerage providers, which serve advertisements (“ads”) to pages of content providers. The advertisers pay the OSP for click activity on served ads; the OSP in turn pays the content providers for the traffic attracted to create the click activity, keeping a percentage as a fee. The OSP also includes search and media businesses services to acquire, identify, and serve ads to Web searchers (variably referred to as users or consumers) who seek information on products or services and who want to transact business online or offline.
Every query or information request is associated with a search or a browsing action to a web page, which may include ads. For a query, such as “dental services,” the OSP matches and serves relevant dentists for the searcher. Sets of queries create the notion of “keyword market.” In order to provide relevant ads to user queries, the OSP constantly needs to establish an advertiser base, which in turn builds an inventory of ads that can be served in response to keyword queries or on Web pages of related content. Size and depth of an ad inventory effectively controls the OSP's capability of fulfilling needs of online users that arise in diverse settings, to include but not limited to user demographics, products and services, online and offline needs, geography, interest categories, etc. Thus, the OSP's inventory-building strategy requires systems and methods to guide decision-making in advertiser acquisition and retention while meeting its business objectives.